US Civil War between 1815 and 1848

The Missouri Compromise fails?

"On February 13, 1819, 35-year-old Congressman William Cobb unfolded his six-foot frame from his chair in the chamber of the Old Brick Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and locked his gray eyes on James Tallmadge Jr. of New York. There was little love lost between the grandson of Georgia’s most famous patriarch and the accomplished city lawyer. They had tangled on issues before, Cobb eloquently if savagely attacking Andrew Jackson over his campaign in Florida against the Seminoles; Tallmadge had defended the general with equal vigor.

"At the moment, Congress was in the midst of discussing Missouri statehood, by now a normal expectation whenever a frontier territory attained the qualifying number of white settlers. Suddenly Tallmadge had electrified the proceedings by introducing a controversial proposal: statehood should only be granted, he insisted, if the further importation of slaves was prohibited. In addition, emancipation would come to all children born to slaves when they reached 25. Cobb and other Southern congressmen were outraged.

"“You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish,” Cobb told Tallmadge, his eyes blazing. The 41-year-old veteran of the War of 1812 was not one to back down: “If a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come!” In a moment the smoldering coals of the slavery issue threatened to catch fire and burn out of control..." https://www.americanheritage.com/compromise-2-missouri-slave-or-free
 
This guy, William Cobb, is really obscure, not even a WP page. He was from the South, I presume? - Some description of the post-ARW, pre-ACW time sound as if Clay, Calhoun and Webster had been the only ones holding the union together with compromises. Target them?
 
Could set it up with a series of events that alienate parts of the South more, earlier.

Say, finagle yourself a way from Congress to deny the Treaty of New Echota, and have the President of the time also oppose the dispossession of Native Land (I have been considering even having Jackson nearly being killed during the Red Sticks, but only having his life saved by his Native allies, combined by other changes to give him a change of heart). Then, when Georgia unilaterally tries to take the land anyway, the Federal government comes down hard, forcing Georgia and South Carolina early into a nullification camp.

No one says the Civil War has to be over slavery, after all. You can have multiple sources prodding it along.
 
Yeah. Mind you, that's likely South Carolina be the rest of the US, so it should be short and definitive.
Edit: or SC be vs the North with much of the South standing on the sidelines. Still be short.

One caution on this "South Carolina would be isolated" business:

As long as the issue was nullification due to the tariff, SC was pretty isolated. The theory of nullification --that a state had the right to nullify a US law and stay in the Union was overwhelmingly rejected outside SC. And while most of the South was anti-tariff, there were exceptions--LA was strongly protectionist (sugar)--and even the pro-free-trade South generally was not as obsessed with tariffs as SC was. And of course in 1833 the President was a Southerner and a slaveholder.

However, once SC seceded--especially if it seemed that the North was showing an unwillingness to compromise on the tariff--it might be considerably less isolated in the South. As William Freehling noted in The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854: Volume 1, many southerners who did not believe in the right of nullification did believe in the right of secession (and thought that it might someday be necessary if the abolitionists got too powerful): "Many states' righters beyond Carolina, while repudiating Nullifiers' notion of living under a government and vetoing its laws, affirmed each state's right to secede and form another government. Southern states' righters especially believed erring slaveholding brothers must be allowed peacefully to leave the Union." https://books.google.com/books?id=iqdoAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA281 Even Marin Van Buren warned Jackson against including a denunciation of the right of secession in the Proclamation on Nullification, lest it cost Jackson support in VA and elsewhere. And indeed, "The Virginia legislature, even while sending Leigh to stop South Carolina from nullifying, affirmed that any state could legally secede." Ibid. Freehling also notes:

"Southern restiveness with a not-enough-states’-rights Jackson was illustrated in an early senatorial confrontation on Jackson’s so-called Force Bill. That bill, reflecting Jackson’s strategy, authorized new ways to enforce the tariff, without force if possible and with more federal troops if necessary. Fifteen of the 24 senators from slaveholding states voted unsuccessfully to table discussion of possible military coercion. The roll call revealed a South split in its usual way. Thirteen of 16 Deep and Middle South senators voted to table the Force Bill. Only two of eight Border South senators concurred.27

"The vote signaled that in the more southern South, support for Jackson was none too hard. While Southrons applauded Jackson’s insistence that states’ rights did not justify nullification, they squirmed at Jackson’s notion that states’ rights did not justify secession. Their selective cheering could land them in Calhoun’s camp, if war broke out over secession rather than nullification. Wishing to avoid that debacle, they sought to lower the tariff before state veto led to disunion..." https://webcache.googleusercontent....ion-volume-i/16.php+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

In spite of this, there would be far more southern support for the Union in case of war than there was in 1861--in particular, the loyalty of Tennessee would not even be in question. But SC might not be as isolated as is sometimes thought, which is one reason there was so much pressure to make some concessions to her on the tariff to give her a graceful way to avoid confrontation.
 
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Jackson warned a South Carolina congressman that ‘Tell them from me that they can talk and write resolutions and print threats to their heart's content, but if one drop of blood be shed there in defiance of the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man of them I can get my hands on to the first tree I can find.’

When Robert Hayne ventured, ‘I don’t believe he would really hang anybody, do you?’ Thomas Hart Benton replied,'Well before he invaded Florida on his own hook, few people could have believed that he would hang [Alexander] Arbuthnot and shoot [Robert] Ambrister -- also on his own authority -- could they? I tell you, Hayne, when Jackson begins to talk about hanging, they can begin to look out for ropes!’
 
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